The Olive Grove

The Olive Grove
By Anna Boberg

“But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.”
Psalm 52:8

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There is something holy about an olive grove. To stand among ancient olive trees — gnarled, twisted, weather-beaten — is to stand in the presence of living things that have endured tremendous travail in a hard land. Several olive trees on the Mount of Olives are estimated to be more than two thousand years old. Their roots grip flinty rock. Their leaves never fall but are instead perpetually renewed. Even when cut down, new shoots spring from apparently dead roots. Some have suggested that olive groves give the impression of something immortal.

But olive trees do not mature quickly. The best yields come only after twelve or more years of patient care. Yet a mature olive tree, with very little attention given to it, will continue to produce heavily for many hundreds of years. And, remarkably, olive trees do not produce their finest fruit when given too much water. They are hardy and instead seem to thrive under tremendous stress. Long and intense periods of drought do not destroy them — they merely cause them to deepen their roots. 

Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus loved to pray among the olives. G.K. Chesterton wrote of the “startling hardness” of the trees in Gethsemane, “accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument.” And Charles Spurgeon marveled at the connection: “I cannot help thinking that our Savior loved to get among the olive trees because of the very congenial form of the olive. It twists and winds and turns about as though it were in an agony. … There is no tree which seems more suggestive of a fellow-feeling with the sufferer than an olive — no shade that is more sweetly pensive, more suitable to the season of sorrow.”

It was to such a place — Gethsemane, literally “the oil press” — that Jesus went on His final night. Edersheim described it as “a quiet resting-place, for retirement, prayer, perhaps sleep, and a place also where not only the Twelve, but others also, may have been wont to meet the Master.” In that familiar, beloved grove, the weight of the world’s sorrow pressed down upon Him, and from every pore flowed the oil of redemption. As Alexander Maclaren wrote, “Truly it was ‘an oil-press,’ in which ‘the good olive’ was crushed by the grip of unparalleled agony, and yielded precious oil, which has been poured into many a wound since then.”

The olive tree teaches us what faithfulness looks like across a lifetime: not dramatic, not quick, but rooted deep — producing fruit through seasons of drought, growing more fruitful with age, springing back to life from what appeared to be death. In the Jewish tradition, olive oil is the oil of gladness, and the olive tree the “tree of light.” And Scripture itself calls Israel “a green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit.”

Perhaps we, too, are olive trees — planted anew in Christ, meant to endure, meant to be pressed, meant to yield something precious. As Truman Madsen gently urged: “I pray that when your life, the life of attempted faithfulness, is bludgeoned and becomes wearing and wearying, you will remember that no great and good fruit comes easily, that you are the olive plants who were supposedly planted anew in him, and that only time and suffering and endurance can produce the peaceable and perfect fruit which he yearns for you to have.”

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